There’s nothing like fresh basil. But sometimes it needs a little something fresh for contrast — a little zing to cut its musky bass notes. It needs … lime.

The winner of our recipe contest — and its prize of a year’s membership at the Denver Botanic Gardens — is Jeanne-Marie Oliver of Longmont, who knows this magic combination well. Her own garden is indoors and hydroponic — yes, the familiar AeroGarden; a couple of Denver Post staffers have them, and they keep these folks supplied with fresh herbs all winter. Jeanne-Marie grows mostly basil in it (“I grew the other herbs the first time through, but realized how much we really liked and used the basil, so I stuck with that,” she says). She’s able to harvest basil about every other week.

Her household of lucky diners includes her husband, two daughters, 16 and 20, and two pooches, a fierce Pomeranian and a watchful Border Collie mix. The humans in the clan are vegetarian, and I loved Jeanne-Marie’s recipe for pasta with add-ins because, rather than having to cater to everyone’s whims, which is always exciting with young eaters, you just set the seasonings on the table and let them build their own. She sets up small dishes of capers, grated parmesan, chopped kalamata olives, green onions and tomatoes. You could adapt the concept for carnivores with crunchy bits of pancetta or good ham, steamed or grilled asparagus chunks, caramalized cipollini onions, crumbled chevre, slivers of dry salame. Or with home-grown Thai basil and rice noodles (and add-in dishes of bean sprouts, shiitakes, cilantro, etc…) The only limit is your imagination.

Here’s Jeanne-Marie’s winning recipe, which is so simple you just about have to make it.

Cook pasta and drain. Set the table with your favorite pasta accessories. On medium heat, add butter to pasta pot; cook until melted. Turn the heat down to low; add the pasta, basil and lime juice. Toss until it’s all coated; then bring it to the table warm.

Want to grow your own basil from seed? Remember that basil does NOT like it cold. A kiss of frost is pretty much the kiss of death for it; temps below 65 will make transplants pouty. So if you’re starting it now, be prepared to baby it indoors for a good while. (When I plant mine, I put it in my south-facing brick planter for extra insurance against cold nights). It germinates quite happily from seed indoors, but put it in the warmest room for best results; it likes the starting medium around 70 degrees.

One more reason to plant basil: Sweet corn. My garden buddy Sheron has many divine culinary tricks in her vast repertoire, but one of her best is basil-lime butter on sweet corn. Buzz equal amounts of butter and olive oil in the food processor and add basil and lime juice and zest. We let other folks grow the corn, but having something homegrown on it makes it yummier.

Despite that final feeling that always invades when I pull the last tomatoes in, the fat lady never really sings for a garden. Or rather, she sings, but then the soundtrack sort of plays in the background until spring, sometimes loud and rollicking, sometimes soft and slow and elegiac.

So you can’t quite face those fall garden cleanup chores yet, with this weekend’s deep freeze coming on? Just think of it as kale-sweetening weather. I like to grow kale, but cooking with it is a challenge. You’ve first got to rip it off those woody stems (I’ve found that doing just that, ripping with your hands, seems fastests) and then steam or blanch and then saute it. And this year, in my Soil Sisters garden at my best friend’s place, we grew several big dinosaur — a.k.a lacinato — kale plants. The challenge of unlocking kale’s nutrition doesn’t daunt cookbook author Terry Walters, though. Her <> “Clean Food” book, gorgeously designed and grouped into seasons, has an amazing buffet of vegetable dishes. (It’s the fat cookbook with the electric green cover that some Barnes and Noble stores were displaying last Monday for 30% off.) I’ll pop one of the easier recipes onto the end of this post.

Meanwhile, even if you don’t want to dig in the dirt this weekend in the cold — or you’re saving all your energy to cheer on the Rockies — there are plenty of reasons to not give up on your garden yet. Jeff Ashton, author of the now-out-of-print-but-still-useful-as-heck “The 12-Month Gardener,“ has some useful tips for fall and winter planting that I’ll share next week.

What’s shaking out there in the garden world? First, there are fall sales at your local garden shop. Look there first for bulbs, soil amendments, fall fertilizers for your lawn and perennials, and sales on gloves, tools, and perennials. Check out The Post’s 2008 perennial planting info before you go.

If you’d rather celebrate than shop, check out the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield’s Pumpkin Festival NEXT Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 17 and 18 (the corn maze will still be there this weekend, the 10-11, but the festival’s been moved). There’s a pumpkin patch with pumpkins for sale, a corn maze and lots of other family fun. The pumpkin patch alone is bigger than 8 acres; there’s hayrides and craft vendors, too, and costumed kids are admitted to the festival (though not the maze) free.

Meanwhile, up north at The Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins, there’s a Halloween festival on Halloween Day, but also a buffet of classes most weekend days through October, including centerpieces this Saturday (10/10 and indoor succulents next Saturday (10/17). (You’ll need to download a .pdf file of the classes for more complete info, or subscribe to the garden’s emailed newsletter.

Here’s Terry Walters’ recipe for Kale with Caramelized Shallots (if you buy just one bunch of kale, this recipe is easily cut in half to serve 3 — or, well, one person if you chow down on greens like I do.)

In large skillet or Dutch oven over medium heat, saute shallots in 1 tablespoon olive oil for 6-8 minutes or until very soft and caramelized. [An interjection from Susan: Shallots go soft for me very quickly, so I plan to caramelize a whole bunch and freeze them.] Add lemon juice and saute another 2-3 minutes to brown. Remove from heat and set aside.

Bring a large pot of water to boil. cut and remove dired stem ends from kale and submerge whole leaes in boiling water for 2-3 minutes or until tender and bright gren. Remove from heat, drain and chop into bite-size pieces. Add kale to pan with shallots and saute one minute. Add remaining 2 tablespoons oil, season to taste with salt and pepper and serve.

Eight pounds of green tomatoes.
One hour kneeling in the dirt and dark.

How do you put a season to bed, on a balmy night before the first snowy morning of the year? The garden work isn’t over; there’s much tidying to be done, and a winter bed to be put in, an homage to hope and spring. And eating, oh, there’s eating to do — right now it’s a ham omelet with the last of the parsley from the brick planter in front of my house, and a chicken breast poaching to be simmered with potatoes and kale and onions for an office dinner. A tiny green lacewing crawls out of the parsley as I chop it, just ahead of the knife.

If you’ve never been in your garden by moonlight, it’s a whole different trip, like milking by braille, groping underneath the tomato cages, hefting the vines for the hidden weight, spying among them for vaguely spherical gleams. The crickets and then the coyotes’ distant call for company. Soon after I arrive at my garden I turn the car lights off; once I’ve ventured deep into its fading jungle they are more hindrance than help. The brittle, silvered leaves whisper as I unlayer their tangles, searching for any lurking denials of summer’s end. I find one last, little, orange squash in the collapsed vines. I pick a few tiny Sungolds and a bounty of Black Pear and Amish Pastes. I learn to guess in the dark at what might be a hint of red, a fading into yellow. But even green and hard as rocks, it’s their time to come in, I tell these wizened, crunching tomato vines. The moon comes out to give me a bit of light. The scents of basil and thyme, bruised by my clumsy feet and knees, waft up, and a donkey’s call echoes in the distance. No smell of snow yet here, on this first foothill west of Loveland, so I know it won’t come until morning. It’s almost balmy. I snap off some dark, bug-nibbled lacinato kale, dig a bit in the carrot and turnip bed, pet the strawberry plants, stumble over a clutch of downed sunflower heads. And look up at a sculpted sky: Waning moon, backlit clouds, a few stars.

We did this, my best friends and I. Against this backdrop of hillside and rock, we made this. Food for more friends, food against the coming of the winter, to share with them and a fire. A new flock of chickens stalks the beds for bugs, tries to hide eggs under the Nanking cherry. The stalks of the too-abundant sunflowers are piled for kindling.

No garden is ever perfect except in one’s mind, and no garden is ever over — there’s always another chore that could be done. But on this last night before snow, there’s a breath of completeness that sighs around the hill, with bird-strewn seeds sinking into the dirt, dried zinnia heads nodding good-bye.

Poach the chicken breast for a half hour in water to cover and the tamarai. Meanwhile, chop the onion coarsely and sweat it over low heat in a heavy, deep pan in a tablspoon of the olive oil and all of the butter. While the chicken poaches, coarsely chop the peppers and add to the heavy pan; ditto the sun-dried tomatoes. When the chicken is done, remove it and let rest. Scrub the potatoes, chop into big bite-size chunks and boil in the same water as the chicken for 20 minutes or until fork-soft. After a little rest, chop the poached chicken breast into bite-size chunks. When the potatoes are done, turn up the heat on the onion pan a bit, add another tablespoon of olive oil, then take out the potatoes with tongs and add them. Once they’re heated, add the chopped chicken and a ladle or two of the chicken-potato broth. Simmer that a bit to let the flavors marry. Add salt and pepper to taste; add the thyme and chopped fresh herbs. Devour hot. Or devour hot with a few shavings of really good cheese, or dollops of goat cheese.

Ah, tomatoes how we love them, how we fuss over them, how we crave them, plan them, nurture them, savor them and … yes, hate them, sometimes. Especially in a year like this one (or last year) when the weather (cold, hail, heat, more cold) did its best to thwart everyone’s tomato ambitions. But there was no thwarting for six lucky Front Range gardeners at the annual Nature Sweet Home-Grown Tomato Contest last Saturday morning in the parking lot of the Arvada King Soopers’.

Large tomatoes await judging

Nature Sweet is a commercial tomato grower out of San Antonio, Texas — but they love tomatoes enough to know that a rising tomato-red tide can lift all boats. So they do this contest every year just to celebrate the ambition of tomato gardeners and the wide world of this little red fruit.

Eight-seven people brought their tomatoes to be Brix-tested — a way of measuring the tomato’s sugar level with a little gizmo called a refractometer — and then three finalists in both large and small were taste-tested by a panel of judges that I was lucky enough to be on again.

The winners in each of the two categories got $2,500, and runners-up received $250 King Soopers’ gift cards. The winners (drum roll for wooden spoon and stock pot, please!)

Brix testing a tomato

Large tomato: Mary Burroughs of Denver with a Cherokee Purple tomato that took me right back to my grandfather’s central Illinois farm with its big, round, gardeny beefsteak flavor. (Oh, the platefuls of garden tomatoes we devoured back then…)

Runners up: Mary Lucero of Lafayette with a “Super Fantastic” (the variety that took first place last year, folks) and Matt Brandt of Longmont (who also was a runner-up last year) with a beautiful yellow-red “Mr. Stripey.”)

Small tomatoes: These babies are the sugar rush of the tomato world. The sugar level on a typical Nature Sweet cherry tomato is about 8; one of the cherry finalists rang the sugar bell above 12! Now that’s a sweet tomato! First place went to Veronica Gonzalez of Arvada, with a Sungold that I would have sworn had been dipped in wine before they cut it. Sweet, sweet, sweet, with a winey acid balance that hit me in the pit of the stomach like a first kiss or a swig of beer after a hot day of hoeing. Runners up were Lynne Milane of Erie, with a red cherry; and Jamie Steenport of Longmont with another Sungold.

Also that morning, Chef Tony Baumann and his daughter and business partner, Sam Baumann, were on hand to feed the crowd samples of tomato dishes — and give me some tips on taming garlic.

Tony and Sam had a great skilletful of sauteed cherry tomatoes with just the lightest coating of mild garlic flavor — which is how I think it should be. I like garlic, but I don’t want my taste buds to have to wear a hazmat suit.

Chef Tony Baumann of B&B Culinary Creations

Baumann says to add crushed fresh garlic at the end of cooking — and keep it on the (medium) heat only until you can begin to smell it. Or blanch it first — a couple of minutes in a cup of water from a teakettle, then a dip in ice water to stop that cooking process. Or, adds his daughter, blanch it in milk — milk no warmer than you’d put in a baby’s bottle (that would be about 110 degrees, adds her dad). Add the basil even later. (If you grow garlic, or know someone who does, that’s the best way to get it mild — cook it right out of the garden.)

Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a saute pan over medium-high flame until it just starts to smoke. Ad tomatoes and season with salt and pepper. Saute, shaking the pan frequently, until tomatoes soften and skins just begin to wrinkle, about 2 minutes. Stir in the garlic and continue to shake the pan until the garlic is fragrant. Remove from heat, stir in the basil and remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil, then serve. Add shavings of cheese if desired.

(Chef Tony adds that you can add a pound of cooked, bite-size pasta at the garlic stage, or the pasta and a pound of julienned grilled chicken breast, to make this a main dish).

The Nature Sweet folks won’t mind if you substitute your own winning home-grown tomatoes. Really. If you’ve got ’em, this is a great way to use them.

So much to plant, do, see, plan, buy … There’s plenty good garden stuff going on out there in the dog days of August. If you’re despairing about your case of Total Tomato Denial Syndrome, turn to our Style section for a roundup of veggies it’s not too late to plant. Lettuce loves it cool, and folk, it’s cool now. I’m not saying we’re not going to get another spell of hot, but 48-degree nights? That’s lettuce weather. (And don’t forget, this Friday’s the last day to tell me your tomato tales and win a copy of Tim Stark’s “Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer — read the post below for details.)

What are you doing to keep your hands dirty? Personally, Digging In went on a field trip — to Santa Fe, down the back alleys of its legendary swanky art galleries, to look at plants and gardens.

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I got the idea from Seeds of Change, which offers two annual farm tours, one last Sunday and one coming up in September. I also lucked into meeting Jennifer, a landscape architect and the best Santa Fe garden guide and hostess ever. Jennifer and I wandered up Canyon Road, noshing on shrubbery that offered up ripe chokecherries and currants, stretching up to tree branches to grab tart mulberries. We ducked into tiny pocket paradises, rocked on stone chairs in a Tibetan garden, ogled espaliered apple orchards and snuffled milkweed blossoms.

And then we stumbled onto Elspeth Bobbs’ place.

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Let me just say, words fail me. This 25-“room” private garden, testimony to one woman’s whims and obsessions and her ability to draw in artists and helpers and family and sustainability geeks, bowled me over. From a room that both pays tribute, and thumbs its nose at, all religion, to a giant spiral sculpture that celebrates poetry and math and bees and divine coincidence, to the food gardens bursting with flowers and purple cauliflower and squash and four successions of sweet corn … to the tiny knotwork shrub garden … I’ve never seen anything like it. Full of secrets and revelations and visions and meanderings and murals and … well. More when my sense of wonder allows me to figure out how to describe it.

Next I paid a visit to the high holy of Western gardening, High Country Gardens’ Santa Fe Greenhouse. On the web and in the minds of gardeners, this is a site of pilgrimage. But in Santa Fe, it’s also a place to buy and see. Kindly, funny Karen, after picking me out a salvia variety that might overwinter on my hell corner where “Wild Thing” did not, pointed me toward the xeric demonstration garden, where I saw funky sedums that bloom in red flowers on stalks and gnarled pines and agastaches of all shapes and colors, blue spireas awash in bees.

But because Santa Fe has had an unusually rainy summer, the real showstopper was the cottage garden. Towering, buttercream hollyhocks waved above my head. Shrub roses bursting their beds to grow to the size of Volkswagens, one playing host to a 7-inch-wide swallowtail butterfly, fanning itself in the shade. I spent as much time as I could, and then, with a half-hour left to shop, scooped up my “Ultra Violet” salvias and quickly scouted the half-off big pots Karen had tipped me off to. I came home with four! If you have a fave garden store here in Colorado, now’s the time to go. You can nab great deals on plants, shrubs, trees, and sometimes hard goods like pots, gloves, garden bling and tools they just don’t want to keep in inventory. It’s also true at some online stores, but this is a good time to buy local and make sure that your favorite business stays in business.

Then it was back to Jennifer’s house for a marvelous dinner on the patio with wine and stories and home-grown patty pan squash and tomatoes and basil. We completely forgot the fresh little peppercini peppers we’d gotten at the Santa Fe farmer’s market, where they were simply charring them in a pan with olive oil and salt and then eating them whole off the stem, seeds and all.

More soon on the tour of the Seeds of Change farm. Cardoons! Devil’s Claw! Squash! Biodiesel!

Oh, twist my arm harder! I had enough requests that I decided to post this. It’s gluten-free, as am I, but if you can eat regular pasta, go for it; you can also substitute bread crumbs for the rice crumbs and regular flour for the potato flour in the white sauce. It sounds like more work than it is, really, but it does involve firing up a pot of hot water, a couple of skillets, AND the oven. I’m a maximum-mess cook. (If you like the sound of this dish, but haven’t time for that kind of mess, just do the sausage, squash and poblanos in the same skillet, then layer on little slabs of the cheese and let them melt.) Or, if you’ve oodles of time and you’re being all Iron Cheffy, add a garnish of fresh sliced poblano rings. They bake up all crispy, shattery and spicy, and add a third and different layer of heat to the roasted poblanos and the El Diente seasoning.

Combine the rice crumbs and seasoning mix. Set aside. Cook the rice pasta about 13 minutes; rinse in cold water and toss dry. Spin in a salad spinner if you’ve got one to remove as much water as possible. Toss with a tablespoon of the olive oil.

Take the round zucchini. If they have stems and are round, cut a sliver from one side so that the squash will lie on its side without rolling. (If it has no stem, or is wider than it is tall, do the same on the bottom unless it already stands securely on its blossom end). Next, make a cut to remove the top side, above the stem (if the squash is sitting on its blossom end, cut off the top). Using a sharp paring knife and a grapefruit spoon or sharp paring knife, cut around the inside of the squash and remove it in chunks, leaving a shell that’s at least ½ inch in thickness and has the stem for a handle.” Spray a shallow metal pan with nonstick cooking spray and set the squash, cavity up, in the pan.
Slice out any seedy parts of the removed squash and slice into quarter-inch thick chunks. Set aside. Cut the other two zucchini into wedges and remove peels; then slice the wedges into quarter-inch chunks. Combine the squash chunks; you’ll need about 2 cups. Set aside.
Slice the sausages lengthwise, then chop into 1/3-inch thick half-rounds. Saute in olive oil until just crispy. Remove from the pan and set aside. In the same pan, sauté the zucchini in 1 T. olive oil until tender, adding the chopped poblanos. Cook until the squash has released its juices and is tender. Drain well. Add the squash and poblanos to the cooked sausage.

In another pan, melt the butter. Whisk in the flour and cook until it begins to thicken. Add the half and half a little bit at a time, whisking constantly. Add the shredded cheese a handful at a time. Allow the sauce to be very thick; it will gain water from being baked in the squash.

Combine the sausage-poblano-zucchini mixture and the pasta; toss to mix well. Add the cheese sauce and stir to combine; salt to taste. Fill each zucchini ball with the mixture. Sprinkle with the rice crumb-seasoning mixture; garnish if desired with thin rings of whole, fresh poblano peppers. Put leftover macaroni mixture into an ovenproof casserole and sprinkle with the remaining rice crumb/seasoning mix; if desired, sprinkle additional shredded cheese on top.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30-40 minutes, or until the zucchini bowls are releasing their juices and the sauce is bubbling. Serve hot. Devour!

These are the little Rond de Nice zukes that I waxed poetic about back in March — the ones I thought would be non-world-dominating, non-sneaky. But they ARE plenty exuberant and plenty abundant, and one cluster of them is plenty happy in the melon patch at my friend’s. She’s been eating blossoms for a bit, and last weekend I harvested two, one to chop and saute, and one to scoop out, stuff with the chicken-sausage-zucchini-poblano pepper macaroni and cheese recipe I’ve invented, and bake.

Something about that recipe made the entire kitchen smell divine. And if it wasn’t poblano peppers that I grew, oh well. (My saved seeds never germinated). If your garden, like mine, is delivering mixed blessings right now — somethings, like zucchini, doing great, others doing quite poopily, thank you, well, get thee to your local farmer’s market for cherries and lettuce and corn, oh my! My insanely abundant weekend haul included Amish speckled lettuce and spring turnips — I’d never known there were such things. The lettuce is a little chewy, a little on the bitter side, but ANY lettuce that looks good in this heat is fabulous in my book. And it tasted great with a few tomatoes and some olive oil and salt dumped on it. Dressing? I don’t need no stinkin’ dressing!

And if you can’t get to a farmer’s market, scurry to your local county fair and check out the veggies and fruits there. I was helping check in the fruits and veggies at Larimer County this morning, and oh! White acorn squashes to die for. Shiny yellow pumpkin-looking squash, in daddy and momma and baby bear sizes. One woman had GOOSEBERRIES and CURRANTS. A young 4-H’er named Nora finished tagging her own entries, then joined the ranks of volunteers, scurrying around our shelves delivering the plates of entries to their proper, labeled shelves. State entomologist Whitney Cranshaw had his usual, perennially award-winning kohlrabi. Extension Agent Alison Stoven, despite having had her garden smacked around by the Windsor tornado, had some fine-lookin’ pineapple mint, among other entries. And one proud grandma shepherded her daughter’s huge sugar beet entry. My brain is a blur of plates of peppers and string beans and vases of basil and dill and sage.

So if the blur of political news or the heat or traffic or just the insane rush of life has you down, there’s an antidote. Throw a cold go-cup of lemonade in the car and find your farmer’s market, and then your county fair. I defy you to leave without a smile.

The tomato plants came from a retired couple that I met on my town’s bike trail. They have gotten to know me and my big husky over the years, and every year around this time, Lou comes through with a couple of tomato plants. Sometimes Brandywines, sometimes cherries, this year a couple of patios. They often come with a lovely note and they ALWAYS come with biscuits for the dogs. This year, this gift is extra sweet, because Lou and Buddy and I haven’t run into each other in months. Buddy has had some skin surgery that has kept him out of the sun and Lou has had surgery herself, and the last time we met on the bike trail, she said she hadn’t had time to seed any tomatoes. So I now have a burning need to get my own floppy seedlings securely potted in deeper containers so I can take a Brandywine over to Lou and Buddy.

Last year the gift tomatoes had to compete for space and light with the Zucchini That Ate St. Louis, so the yield was small, but oh, so delicious:

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Without much time to preserve or even consume this bounty, I made a very small batch of tomato jam (cinnamon, poblanos, a dash of brown sugar). As summer wore on, time became even shorter, and in September I started just smacking tomato halves drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with herbs onto a hot barbecue grill and then sliding them into freezer containers. That winter we had a lot of pizza parties, and we’d pile the tomatoes and some chevre and some basil on a pizza crust and call it dinner. And it was such a joy, such a gift, when my best friend made the happy-gourmet face over something I just pulled out of the freezer, something that came from my garden. But then, her husband had built me the gift of the raised beds in which I grew the tomatoes. My friend Julie helped me move the soil into them. My sister gave me the grill. And Bo the greedy biscuit-mooching husky secured for me the gift of Lou and Buddy’s friendship, which might not have happened if the dog did not have a steel-trap memory for anyone who has ever fed him or if Buddy didn’t have a soft spot for canine antics. Bo himself was a gift from my vet; my love of dogs, a gift from my parents. When I ponder all this I feel wrapped in a web of gifts as strong and eternal as the cycle from seed to plant to fruit to seed, blessed beyond belief.

And then I think, it’s time to pay the universe back a little.

Plant a Row for the Hungry does just that. It connects food gardeners, who often produce more than they can use or give away, with food banks in their communities. In case you’ve been living under a flower pot lately, it’s rough out there. People are losing jobs, losing homes, losing hope. Many food banks are seeing a 20 percent increase in community need — and a drop in donations or funding. That means they can’t help people who need it.

So let’s see, I can dedicate a row of peas and a row of chard, and … a fifth of whatever tomato/tomatillos get planted out. What are you willing to give? C’mon, Colorado, are you going to let ILLINOIS outshine you? Can you believe the pounds of produce those Cubs-loving flatlanders donated? (I have lots of relatives in the Land of Lincoln, including my Uncle Vernon, the heirloom tomato guru of Bloomington. And if you’re reading, Uncle V., yes, it’s a challenge.)

Tell me what you can give, and I’ll keep a virtual tally here on this blog. There’s not a lot we can do as individuals about food riots in Somalia, or the coming rice crisis in Myanmar. But we can do something about hunger where we live. We can get fresh produce to people who, without us, might have to make do on tinned tuna and canned soup in the midst of summer’s bounty. We can tell them, “you deserve better than that, no matter why you’re here.” We can share our gardens’ abundant gifts.

Tell me when you decide what you’re going to donate, how your garden’s producing and how many pounds you’ve got when you take it to your local food bank. To find out which institutions can accept fresh produce, ask your city administration; your church is another good source. Or start your own Plant a Row campaign if there isn’t yet one in your community.

Dirt Dates: The Denver Botanic Gardens is having its annual Plant Sale starting Friday, May 9, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. (members only 8:30-10 a.m.) and Saturday, May 10 from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. (members only 8:30-10 a.m.). Sayeth the Gardens: “The theme for the 2008 Sale is “Urban Nature” and will feature a variety of options on how to incorporate urban living into your own scenery, whether you have a small garden or no garden at all.” More deets here.

Next weekend, it’s Boulder County’s Ginormous Plant Sale, Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, 8:30-4 p.m. at the corner of Broadway and Iris in Boulder. The proceeds benefit Growing Gardens and the Master Gardener program of Boulder County. More here.

As you’re driving around this month, keep an eye out for smaller plant sales at community colleges and co-ops. Sometimes they’re not big or well-publicized; I stumbled on a tiny one just last weekend and vowed to return to nab some great-looking pepper plants in varieties I didn’t seed this year. If you buy veggies from nonprofits, then donate some of your harvest, you keep the wheel of gifts turning two ways.

Susan Clotfelter has always played in the dirt, but got dragged into gardening as an obsession when she reclaimed her hell corner: a weed-infested patch of clay inhabited by one tough, lonely lilac and a thicket of weeds. Along with training as a Colorado State University Extension Master Gardener volunteer, she dug deeper with beds of herbs and lettuce at her home and rows of vegetables wherever she could borrow land. She writes for The Denver Post and other publications and appears on community radio.

Julie's passion for gardening began in spring of 2000 when she bought a fixer-upper in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and realized that the landsape was in desperate need of some TLC. During the drought of 2003, she decided to give up on bluegrass and xeriscape her front yard. She wrote about the journey in the Rocky Mountain News, in a series called Mud, Sweat & Tears: A Xeriscape story. Julie is an avid veggie gardener as well as a seasoned water gardener.